Sharps’s eyes lit up. “I like it! Let’s hit Earth with a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae.”
Lord God, they’ve gone bonkers, Harvey thought. The two men raced each other to the blackboard. Sharps began to draw. “Okay. Hot fudge sundae. Let’s see: We’ll put the vanilla ice cream in the center with a layer of fudge over it…”
He ignored the strangled sound behind him. Tim Hamner hadn’t said a word during the whole interview. Now he was doubled over, holding himself, trying to hold in the laughter. He looked up, choked, got his face straight, said, “I can’t stand it!” and brayed like a jackass. “My comet! A cubic mile of hot…fudge…sun…dae…”
“With the fudge as the outer shell,” Forrester amplified, “so the fudge will heat up when the Hammer rounds the Sun.”
“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said, straight-faced.
“No, my child, that’s a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. And the ice cream will still be frozen inside the shell,” said Sharps.
Harvey said, “But you forgot the—”
“We put the cherry at one pole and say that pole was in shadow at perihelion.” Sharps sketched to show that when the comet rounded the Sun, the cherry at the oblate spheroid’s axis would be on the side away from Sol. “We don’t want it scorched. And we’ll put crushed nuts all through it, to represent rocks. Say a two-hundred-foot cherry?”
“Carried by the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Mark said.
“Stan Freberg! Right!” Forrester whooped. “Shhhh…plop! Let’s see you do that on television!”
“And now, as the comet rounds the Sun, trailing a luminous froth of fake whipped cream, and aims itself down our throats…Dan, what’s the density of vanilla ice cream?”
Forrester shrugged. “It floats. Say two-thirds.”
“Right. Point six six six it is.” Sharps seized a pocket calculator from the desk and punched frantically. “I love these things. Used to use slide rules. Never could figure out where the decimal point went.
“A cubic mile to play with. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, times twelve for inches, times two point five four for centimeters, cube that…We have two point seven seven six times ten to the fifteenth cubic centimeters of vanilla ice cream. It would take a while to eat it all. Times the density, and lo, we have about two times ten to the fifteenth grams. Couple of billion tons. Now for the fudge…” Sharps punched away.
Happy as a clam, Harvey thought. A very voluble clam equipped with Texas Instruments’ latest pocket marvel.
“What do you like for the density of hot fudge?” Sharps asked.
“Call it point nine,” Forrester said.
“Haven’t any of you made fudge?” Charlene demanded. “It doesn’t float. You test it by dripping it into a cup of cold water. Or at least my mother did.”
“Say one point two, then,” Forrester said.
“Another billion and a half tons of hot fudge,” Sharps said. Behind him Hamner made more strangled noises.
“I think we can ignore the rocks,” Sharps said. “Do you see why, now?”
“Lord God, yes,” Harvey said. He looked at the camera with a start. “Uh, yes, Dr. Sharps, it certainly makes sense to ignore the rocks.”
“You’re not going to show this, are you?” Tim Hamner sounded indignant.
“You’re saying no?” Harvey asked.
“No…no…” Hamner doubled over and giggled.
“Now, she’s coming at cometary speeds. Fast. Let’s see, parabolic speed at Earth orbit is what, Dan?”
“Twenty-nine point seven kilometers per second. Times square root of two.”
“Forty-two kilometers a second,” Sharps announced. “And we’ve got Earth’s orbital velocity to add. Depends on the geometry of the strike. Shall we say fifty kilometers a second as a reasonable closing velocity?”
“Sounds good,” Forrester said. “Meteors go from twenty to maybe seventy. It’s reasonable.”
“Right. Call it fifty. Square that, times a half. Times mass in grams. Bit over two times ten to the twenty-eight ergs. That’s for the vanilla ice cream. Now we can figure that most of the hot fudge boiled away, but understand, Harvey, at those speeds we’re just not in the atmosphere very long. If we come in straight it’s two seconds flat! Anyway, whatever mass you burn up, a lot of the energy just gets transferred to the earth’s heat balance. That’s a spectacular explosion all by itself. We’ll figure twenty percent of the hot-fudge energy transfers to Earth, and”—more buttons pressed, and dramatic rise in voice—“our grand total is two point seven times ten to the twenty-eighth ergs. Okay, that’s your strike.”
“Doesn’t mean much to me,” Harvey said. “It sounds like a big number…”
“One followed by twenty-eight zeros,” Mark muttered.
“Six hundred and forty thousand megatons, near enough,” Dan Forrester said gently. “It is a big number.”
“Good God, pasteurized planet,” Mark said.
“Not quite.” Forrester had his own calculator out of the belt case. “About three thousand Krakatoas. Or three hundred Thera explosions, if they’re right about Thera.”
“Thera?” Harvey asked.
“Volcano in the Mediterranean,” Mark said. “Bronze Age. Where the Atlantis legend comes from.”
“Your friend’s right,” Sharps said. “I’m not sure about the energy, though. Look at it this way. All of mankind uses about ten to the twenty-ninth ergs in a year. That’s everything: electric power, coal, nuclear energy, burning buffalo chips, cars—you name it. So our hot fudge sundae pops in with about thirty percent of the world’s annual energy budget.”
“Um. Not so bad, then,” Harvey said.
“Not so bad. Not so bad as what? A year’s energy in one minute,” Sharps said. “It probably hits water. If it hits land, it’s tough for anyone under it, but most of the energy radiates back out to space fairly quickly. But if it hits water, it vaporizes it. Let’s see, ergs to calories…damn. I don’t have that on my gadget.”
“I do,” Forrester said. “The strike would vaporize about sixty million cubic kilometers of water. Or fifty billion acre-feet, if you like that. Enough to cover the entire U.S.A. with two hundred and twelve feet of water.”
“All right,” Sharps said. “So sixty million cubic kilometers of water go into the atmosphere. Harvey, it’s going to rain. A lot of that water is moving across polar areas. It freezes, falls as snow. Glaciers form fast…slide south…yeah. Harvey, the historians believe the Thera explosion changed the world’s climate. We know that Tamboura, about as powerful as Krakatoa, caused what historians of the last century called ‘the year without a summer.’ Famine. Crop failure. Our hot fudge sundae will probably trigger an ice age. All those clouds. Clouds reflect heat. Less sunlight gets to Earth. Snow reflects heat too. Still less sunlight. It gets colder. More snow falls. Glaciers move south because they don’t melt as fast. Positive feedback.”
It had all turned dead serious. Harvey asked, “But what stops ice ages?”
Forrester and Sharps shrugged in unison.
“So,” Hamner said, “my comet’s going to bring about an ice age?” Now you could see the long lugubrious face of his grandfather, who could look bereaved at a $60,000 funeral.
Forrester said, “No, that was hot fudge sundae we were talking about. Um—the Hammer is bigger.”
“Hamner-Brown. How much bigger?”
Forrester made an uncertain gesture. “Ten times?”
“Yes,” said Harvey. There were pictures in his mind. Glaciers marched south across fields and forests, across vegetation already killed by snow. Down across North America into California, across Europe to the Alps and Pyrenees. Winter after winter, each colder, each colder than the Great Freeze of ’76-’77. And hell, they hadn’t even mentioned the tidal waves. “But a comet won’t be as dense as a cubic mile of h-h-h—”
It was just one of those things. Harvey leaned back in his chair and belly-laughed, because there was just no way he could say
it.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The surfer’s ride is mine. Jerry played with the surfer character, and moved the beach. This is typical. I set the scene at Hermosa Beach, but that wouldn’t give us the right waves…
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Gil rested face-down on the board, thinking slow thoughts, waiting with the others for the one big wave. Water sloshed under his belly. Hot sunlight broiled his back. Other surfboards bobbed in a line on either side of him.
Jeanine caught his eye and smiled a lazy smile full of promises and memories. Her husband would be out of town for three more days. Gil’s answering grin said nothing. He was waiting for a wave. There wouldn’t be very good waves here at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach, but Jeanine’s apartment was near, and there’d be other waves on other days.
The houses and apartments on the bluff above bobbed up and down. They looked bright and new, not like the houses on Malibu Beach, where the buildings always looked older than they were. Yet even here there were signs of age. Entropy ran fast at the line between sea and land. Gil was young, like all the young men bobbing on the water this fine morning. He was seventeen, burned brown, his longish hair bleached nearly white, belly muscles like the discrete plates of an armadillo. He was glad to look older than he was. He hadn’t needed to pay for a place to stay or food to eat since his father threw him out of the house. There were always older women.
If he thought about Jeanine’s husband, it was with friendly amusement. He was no threat to the man. He wanted nothing permanent. She could be making out with some guy who’d want her money on a permanent basis…
He squinted against the brilliance. It flared and he closed his eyes. That was a reflex; wave reflections were a common thing out here. The flare died against his closed eyelids, and he looked out to sea. Wave coming?
He saw a fiery cloud lift beyond the horizon. He studied it, squinting, making himself believe…
“Big wave coming,” he called, and rose to his knees.
Corey called, “Where?”
“You’ll see it,” Gil called confidently. He turned his board and paddled out to sea, bending almost until his cheek touched the board, using long, deep sweeps of his long arms. He was scared shitless, but nobody would ever know it.
“Wait for me!” Jeanine called.
Gil continued paddling. Others followed, but only the strongest could keep up. Corey pulled abreast of him.
“I saw the fireball!” he shouted. He panted with effort. “It’s Lucifer’s Hammer! Tidal wave!”
Gil said nothing. Talk was discouraged out here, but the others jabbered among themselves, and Gil paddled even faster, leaving them. A man ought to be alone during a thing like this. He was beginning to grasp the fact of death.
Rain came, and he paddled on. He glanced back to see the houses and bluff receding, going uphill, leaving an enormous stretch of new beach, gleaming wet. Lightning flared along the hills above Malibu.
The hills had changed. The orderly buildings of Santa Monica had tumbled into heaps.
The horizon went up.
Death. Inevitable. If death was inevitable, what was left? Style, only style. Gil went on paddling, riding the receding waters until motion was gone. He was a long way out now. He turned his board, and waited.
Others caught up and turned, spread across hundreds of yards in the rainy waters. If they spoke, Gil couldn’t hear them. There was a terrifying rumble behind him. Gil waited a moment longer, then paddled like mad, sure deep strokes, doing it well and truly.
He was sliding downhill, down the big green wall, and the water was lifting hard beneath him, so that he rested on knees and elbows with the blood pouring into his face, bugging his eyes, starting a nosebleed. The pressure was enormous, unbearable, then it eased. With the speed he’d gained he turned the board, scooting down and sideways along the nearly vertical wall, balancing on knees…
He stood up. He needed more angle, more. If he could reach the peak of the wave he’d be out of it, he could actually live through this! Ride it out, ride it out, and do it well…
Other boards had turned too. He saw them ahead of him above and below on the green wall. Corey had turned the wrong way. He shot beneath Gil’s feet, moving faster than hell and looking terrified.
They swept toward the bluff. They were higher than the bluff. The beach house and the Santa Monica pier with its carousel and all the yachts anchored nearby slid beneath the waters. Then they were looking down on streets and cars. Gil had a momentary glimpse of a bearded man kneeling with others; then the waters swept on past. The base of the wall was churning chaos, white foam and swirling debris and thrashing bodies and tumbling cars.
Below him now was Santa Monica Boulevard. The wave swept over the Mall, adding the wreckage of shops and shoppers and potted trees and bicycles to the crashing foam below. As the wave engulfed each low building he braced himself for the shock, squatting low. The board slammed against his feet and he nearly lost it; he saw Tommy Schumacher engulfed, gone, his board bounding high and whirling crazily. Only two boards left now.
The wave’s frothing peak was far, far above him; the churning base was much too close. His legs shrieked in the agony of exhaustion. One board left ahead of him, ahead and below. Who? It didn’t matter; he saw it dip into chaos, gone. Gil risked a quick look back: nobody there. He was alone on the ultimate wave.
Oh, God, if he lived to tell this tale, what a movie it would make! Bigger than The Endless Summer, bigger than The Towering Inferno: a stirring movie with ten million in special effects! If only his legs would hold! He already had a world record, he must be at least a mile inland, no one had ever ridden a wave for a mile! But the frothing, purling peak was miles overhead and the Barrington Apartments, thirty stories tall, was coming at him like a flyswatter.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Jerry’s been in South Africa. So we set a subplot in South Africa, but it never quite went anywhere. So we took it out. That left nothing at all happening outside of North America!
So I wrote a scene set on Thera. I’ve never been to Thera either, though Jerry has. I repeated what he’d told me, and relied on Jerry to keep me honest.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
It was mid-morning in California; it was evening in the Greek isles. The last of the sun’s disk had vanished as two men reached the top of the granite knob. In the east a first star showed. Far below them, Greek peasants were driving overloaded donkeys through a maze of low stone walls and vineyards.
The town of Akrotira lay in twilight. Incongruities: white mudwalled houses that might have been created ten thousand years ago; the Venetian fortress at the top of its hill; the modern school near the ancient Byzantine church; and below that, the camp where Willis and MacDonald were uncovering Atlantis. The site was almost invisible from the hilltop. In the west a star switched on and instantly off, blink. Then another. “It’s started,” MacDonald said.
Wheezing, Alexander Willis settled himself on the rock. He was mildly irritated. The hour’s climb had left him breathless, though he was twenty-four years old and considered himself in good shape. But MacDonald had led him all the way and helped him over the top, and MacDonald, whose dark red hair had receded to expose most of his darkly tanned scalp, was not even breathing hard. MacDonald had earned his strength; archeologists work harder than ditchdiggers.
The two sat crosslegged, looking west, watching the meteors.
They were twenty-eight hundred feet above sea level on the highest point of the strange island of Thera. The granite knob had been called many things by a dozen civilizations, and it had endured much. Now it was known as Mount Prophet Elias.
Dusk faded on the waters of the bay far below. The bay was circular, surrounded by cliffs
a thousand feet high, the caldera of a volcanic explosion that destroyed two thirds of the island, destroyed the Minoan Empire, created the legends of Atlantis. Now a new black island, evil in appearance and barren, rose in the center of the bay. The Greeks called it the New Burnt Land, and the islanders knew that some day it too would explode, as Thera had exploded so many times before.
Fiery streaks reflected in the bay. Something burned blue-white overhead. In the west the golden glow faded, not to black, but to a strange curdled green-and-orange glow, a back drop for the meteors. Once again Phaethon drove the chariot of the sun…
The meteors came every few seconds! Ice chips struck atmosphere and burned in a flash. Snowballs streaked down, burning greenish-white. Earth was deep in the coma of Hamner-Brown.
“Funny hobby, for us,” said Willis.
“Sky watching? I’ve always loved the sky,” MacDonald said. “You don’t see me digging in New York, do you? The desert places, where the air’s clear, where men have watched the stars for ten thousand years, that’s where you find old civilizations. But I’ve never seen the sky like this.”
“I wonder what it looked like after you-know-what.”
MacDonald shrugged in the near-dark. “Plato didn’t describe it. But the Hittites said a stone god rose from the sea to challenge the sky. Maybe they saw the cloud. Or there are things in the Bible, you could take them as eyewitness accounts, but from a long way away. You wouldn’t have wanted to be near when Thera went off.”
Willis didn’t answer, and small wonder. A great greenish light drew fire across the sky, moving up, lasting for seconds before it burst and died. Willis found himself looking east. His lips pursed in a soundless Oh. Then, “Mac! Turn around!”
MacDonald turned.
The curdled sky was rising like a curtain; you could see beneath the edge. The edge was perfectly straight, a few degrees above the horizon. Above was the green-and-orange glow of the comet’s coma. Below, blackness in which stars glowed.
“The Earth’s shadow,” MacDonald said. “A shadow cast through the coma. I wish my wife had lived to see this. Just another year…”